I have come to the conclusion that living your life and not get worried/emo about stupid things a.k.a. things you can't control is like one of the hardest challenges ever. I am pretty sure every human being out there shares this struggle. No? If you don't then pray do tell me your secret.
Before I begin, everybody must know this vocab: Confabulate. Meaning? To fill in gaps in memory by fabrication; that's what we do the best, fooling ourselves up. Actually we are so good at it, we don't even realize it. Look, if you don't know, then you don't know. But our mind is so good at making up these plausible fantasy explanations, in our psyche we are convinced about the reality of it; whereas it is only the construct of our mind. This is where most of the worries come from and it is not even real. Although sometimes the mind confabulates for a good reason: A mom is constantly worried about the safety of her child; she can think of 1001 situations where things can go wrong but they rarely even happen. I don't need to tell you situations where the mind confabulates and screws you up, do I?
Well, you say, I'm just rambling this thing up, it's not even scientific. So let's get scientific. The brain has two hemispheres and they are linked by corpus callosum. The left hemisphere is mainly responsible for language processing and analytical thinking, whereas the right hemisphere is good at recognizing pattern in space. The brain is pretty weird, the left hemisphere takes in information from the right side of the body and vice versa - nobody knows why, ask some neuroscientists or neurosurgeons if you don't believe me. I don't want to go into details about how the retina works and how the brain process image, but suffice to say if the retinas pick up something on the left side of its hemisphere it will be processed by the left brain and vice versa.
There is this weird case where a surgeon cut a patient's corpus callosum to save him from extreme seizure. So this person's right brain cannot 'talk' to the left brain and vice versa. A psychologist conducted some experiment to evaluate the 'damage done' by this operation. Here is what happened, when the psychologist flashed a card with a picture of chicken to the right of the patient, the left side of the retina hemispheres picked it up and sent the information to the brain's left hemisphere - remember this is the language processing hemisphere. Then he asked, "What did you see?" The patient answered "A chicken." But when he flashed the chicken card to the left of the patient (remember the right hemisphere will pick up the signal) and he asked "What did you see?" The patient answered, "Nothing." That is because the chicken card image information wasn't passed to the left hemisphere of the brain which 'does the talking', as the interlink between them is severed.
Weird aight? But wait... Now he flashes two cards, at the right a picture of chicken claw and at the left a picture of a house covered in snow. Then he asked the patient to pick from an array of cards what "goes with" with what he had seen. The patient pointed to the picture of chicken with his right hand (which goes with the chicken claw) and a shovel with his left hand (which goes with the house covered with snow). But remember the information from the right brain can't be passed to the left to do the talking. So the patient literally won't be able to explain why he is pointing to the shovel even though his hand knows it's just right. You would expect him to say "I don't know why I'm pointing to the shovel" right? But no, he said "Oh, that's easy, The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."
The mind confabulates! So remember, that's what you do, you confabulate. You don't know about a lot of things but you make up your own explanation for them, thus you get worried about a plethora of imaginary things. How wonderful...
The best solution that I have found so far is to plant a cognitive filter in your mind. Cognitive filter is like a thought police. You have to catch your thread of thought in action, determine whether you are confabulating or not, and put them away if you think most likely you are. But that is just very hard to do right? Actually writing your thoughts down and assess their rationality is what psychologists call cognitive therapy. I thought it will be interesting to learn cognitive therapy, I bought this book but I don't have the time to read it yet.
There is one more big question that we have to tackle: So what is real then if everything is just confabulation? There must be something tangible and real... I guess, but you just don't have to think about it. Wait.. wait.. quantum physics says, it's real only when you observe it, the Schrodinger's cat. Well other people observe it so it's real, it's just that you don't observe it. And you don't have to...
Just when you think you own your mind, no you don't - me (haha..)
The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it - Marcus Aurelius
Note1: The experiment was conducted by Michael Gazzaniga and explained by Haidt. I'm just repeating them.
Note2: I don't want to go in circles all over again about this. So mind, stop thinking... I just want to not-do-anything. Ntah pape merepek.
Before I begin, everybody must know this vocab: Confabulate. Meaning? To fill in gaps in memory by fabrication; that's what we do the best, fooling ourselves up. Actually we are so good at it, we don't even realize it. Look, if you don't know, then you don't know. But our mind is so good at making up these plausible fantasy explanations, in our psyche we are convinced about the reality of it; whereas it is only the construct of our mind. This is where most of the worries come from and it is not even real. Although sometimes the mind confabulates for a good reason: A mom is constantly worried about the safety of her child; she can think of 1001 situations where things can go wrong but they rarely even happen. I don't need to tell you situations where the mind confabulates and screws you up, do I?
Well, you say, I'm just rambling this thing up, it's not even scientific. So let's get scientific. The brain has two hemispheres and they are linked by corpus callosum. The left hemisphere is mainly responsible for language processing and analytical thinking, whereas the right hemisphere is good at recognizing pattern in space. The brain is pretty weird, the left hemisphere takes in information from the right side of the body and vice versa - nobody knows why, ask some neuroscientists or neurosurgeons if you don't believe me. I don't want to go into details about how the retina works and how the brain process image, but suffice to say if the retinas pick up something on the left side of its hemisphere it will be processed by the left brain and vice versa.
There is this weird case where a surgeon cut a patient's corpus callosum to save him from extreme seizure. So this person's right brain cannot 'talk' to the left brain and vice versa. A psychologist conducted some experiment to evaluate the 'damage done' by this operation. Here is what happened, when the psychologist flashed a card with a picture of chicken to the right of the patient, the left side of the retina hemispheres picked it up and sent the information to the brain's left hemisphere - remember this is the language processing hemisphere. Then he asked, "What did you see?" The patient answered "A chicken." But when he flashed the chicken card to the left of the patient (remember the right hemisphere will pick up the signal) and he asked "What did you see?" The patient answered, "Nothing." That is because the chicken card image information wasn't passed to the left hemisphere of the brain which 'does the talking', as the interlink between them is severed.
Weird aight? But wait... Now he flashes two cards, at the right a picture of chicken claw and at the left a picture of a house covered in snow. Then he asked the patient to pick from an array of cards what "goes with" with what he had seen. The patient pointed to the picture of chicken with his right hand (which goes with the chicken claw) and a shovel with his left hand (which goes with the house covered with snow). But remember the information from the right brain can't be passed to the left to do the talking. So the patient literally won't be able to explain why he is pointing to the shovel even though his hand knows it's just right. You would expect him to say "I don't know why I'm pointing to the shovel" right? But no, he said "Oh, that's easy, The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed."
The mind confabulates! So remember, that's what you do, you confabulate. You don't know about a lot of things but you make up your own explanation for them, thus you get worried about a plethora of imaginary things. How wonderful...
The best solution that I have found so far is to plant a cognitive filter in your mind. Cognitive filter is like a thought police. You have to catch your thread of thought in action, determine whether you are confabulating or not, and put them away if you think most likely you are. But that is just very hard to do right? Actually writing your thoughts down and assess their rationality is what psychologists call cognitive therapy. I thought it will be interesting to learn cognitive therapy, I bought this book but I don't have the time to read it yet.
There is one more big question that we have to tackle: So what is real then if everything is just confabulation? There must be something tangible and real... I guess, but you just don't have to think about it. Wait.. wait.. quantum physics says, it's real only when you observe it, the Schrodinger's cat. Well other people observe it so it's real, it's just that you don't observe it. And you don't have to...
Just when you think you own your mind, no you don't - me (haha..)
The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it - Marcus Aurelius
Note1: The experiment was conducted by Michael Gazzaniga and explained by Haidt. I'm just repeating them.
Note2: I don't want to go in circles all over again about this. So mind, stop thinking... I just want to not-do-anything. Ntah pape merepek.
yo man..let's see, history of existence of God, that could be confabulation as well. for all you know. feeling the presence of God. confabulation. our bibles are correct. confabulation.
ReplyDeletehow would you argue that?
Owh, you seems to be struggling with your belief sometimes from what I've read in some of your posts (this is just my assumption a.k.a. confabulation) What's up? Wanna share? Does religion seem neurotic? After all we can be good people even without believing in God? Like the EWBers?
ReplyDeleteI can't give you a satisfactory answer here. Even with evolutionary biology, superstring multiverse, and advancement in neuroscience, I don't see how we can prove that God doesn't exist. Well, people say, the onus of prove is upon those who say God exists, because they made the claim.
But look, in cognitive psychology it is proven that it is innate in human to observe sacredness (be it even without God in the equation), and the natural tendency is to infer a creator when you see creation. This is just basic causality, something must have created this world/universe. And if that entity created space and time, the entity is beyond space and time thus all law of physics doesn't hold to that entity - including the arrow of time, thus it makes perfect sense that entity can be eternal.
Plato, Socrates, other famous medievel philosophers all believe there is God, although their concept of God is deism. Same goes for Einstein: "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" Only lately we confabulate stuff like natural selection, cyclical universe, etc to deny this innate intuition of causality.
Now if you see a Mona Lisa painting, you should say oo you mix some color and you throw it on a wall and wallaa it comes out by random chance - that is called natural selection. Plus, to me even if natural selection holds true, then who made that very improbable chance to happen?
With cyclical universe, okay before big bang, there is a 'previous universe'... Ok fine, so how come the first universe even start, you pushed the time frame backward by having a series of universe, but that still doesn't answer the question who started it?
When will neuroscience explain about the soul? So next, not only we can clone your dna, but we can make the very same tsuey come back to life too?
Answer all those and we can talk about confabulating God. But the very simplest answer is, I am His servant through and through, and if other people are too arrogant to admit that, then I hope they will change for I fear a day when they will be asked about it.
Cheers :)
P.S. But of course my concept of God is a bit different than yours. There is only one God, but God, and he is beyond space-time. So theology is not so big in Islam like in Christianity because we have less issues to deal with. Whatever it is, I hope you are certain in your believe in God. Cheers :)